Ruth Bloomfield

Is North London’s housing market recession-proof?

The most politicised pocket of the capital is well placed to ride out a slump

  • From Spectator Life
Primrose Hill [iStock]

Of all the suburbs in Britain none has become quite so politicised as North London. This slightly leafy (and lefty) swathe in and around Islington – with Hampstead Heath marking its northern edge and Regent’s Park its southern boundary – is treated by our recent political leaders as a kind of shorthand for, to borrow a phrase from Suella Braverman, the ‘tofu-eating wokerati’.

Liz Truss took a dig at her privileged metropolitan enemies who ‘taxi from North London townhouses to the BBC studio’ to criticise her, ignoring the fact that Islington is not all Upper Street boutiques and multi-million pound homes. Islington is one of London’s most deprived boroughs, and more than a third of children in Camden live in low-income families.

Truss followed the party line set by Boris Johnson, who savaged the ‘trendy Islington lawyers’ leading the Labour party – conveniently forgetting that he once lived in the borough with his ex-wife Marina Wheeler, a King’s Counsel. Even

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